Paul K. Keene, 94, Organic Farming Pioneer

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: May 18, 2005

Paul K. Keene, a pioneer of organic farming in the United States whose products were among the first commercially available organic foods in the country, died on April 23 at a nursing home in Mechanicsburg, Pa. He was 94. Mr. Keene's family announced the death.

For more than half a century, Mr. Keene ran Walnut Acres Farm, near Penns Creek in central Pennsylvania, which produced and packaged an array of foods including peanut butter, granola and free-range chicken. Walnut Acres products were grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and were stocked by health food stores around the country and sold worldwide through the company's mail-order catalog.

Mr. Keene's company was sold in 2000 and is no longer in business. A line of foods bearing the Walnut Acres Organic label is now manufactured by the Hain Celestial Group, a natural-foods conglomerate.

When Mr. Keene started Walnut Acres in the mid-1940's, the agricultural gospel called for using chemical fertilizers and insecticides, with their promise of cheaper, more efficient farming. Natural farming was viewed as eccentric, if not downright un-American.

''It doesn't seem that long ago that everyone thought we were kooks or Commies,'' Mr. Keene told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. ''Someone once tossed dynamite on the property. Another burned crosses.''

A former mathematics professor and avowed pacifist, Mr. Keene never set out to be a commercial farmer. He simply wanted to go back to the land.

Paul Kershner Keene was born in Lititz, Pa., on Oct. 12, 1910. After earning an undergraduate degree from Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., and a master's in mathematics from Yale, he taught math at Drew University in Madison, N.J.

In the late 1930's, Mr. Keene took a teaching job in northern India. There, he became involved in the Indian independence movement and met Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose belief in simple living greatly influenced him. He also discovered the work of Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the organic farming movement, who worked in India for many years.

In India, Mr. Keene met Enid Betty Morgan, the daughter of missionaries. They were married in 1940. Returning to the United States shortly afterward, the couple studied organic farming at the School of Living in Suffern, N.Y., and later at Kimberton Farm School in Pennsylvania.

Just after World War II, the Keenes borrowed $5,000 and bought Walnut Acres, determined to live as self-sufficient organic farmers. There was no telephone, plumbing or furnace on the farm. The buildings were falling to pieces. The couple owned a plow, a harrow, a team of horses and little else.

''Oh, the wonder of it all,'' Mr. Keene wrote afterward. ''We had a house and barn and outbuildings and a hundred acres. Did you hear? One hundred acres!''

Their first product was Apple Essence, an apple butter cooked in an iron kettle over an open fire. They made 100 quarts, selling them for a dollar each. One found its way to Clementine Paddleford, the influential food editor of The New York Herald-Tribune, who was known for waxing rhapsodic over regional foods that took her fancy. Miss Paddleford rhapsodized, and Walnut Acres was inundated with letters and visits from eager customers.

The Keenes used manure for fertilizer and botanical pest controls like ladybugs. They gradually built the farm into a 500-acre spread, with its own bakery, cannery, flour mill and retail store. By 1994, the company was making 350 products, with annual sales of nearly $8 million, U.S. News reported.

Mrs. Keene died in 1987. Mr. Keene is survived by a sister, Ruth Hostettler, of Cornwall, Pa.; three daughters: Marjorie Ann Hartley and Ruth Keene Anderson, both of Middleburg, Pa., and Jocelyn Betty Keene of Pasadena, Calif.; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.